Those words exploded on the screen of my youth (and maybe yours, too) during the famously cheesy fight scenes in the Batman TV series. I loved them. Their primal colors and expanding letters syncing with horn blares, punctuating the show with such onomatopoetic pleasure – who could resist? It was the psychedelic 60’s on the heels of the afrofuturism that began in the 50’s, and the art and streets were in full rebellion against, well, you name it.

This is an oversimplification, of course, times and people being what they are — complicated and variable. Besides, I didn’t know any of that then. Heck, I wasn’t even born when the episode at the bottom of this post first aired. But I am looking back on those scenes, overlaying them with colorized scrims of meaning for myself.

Why am I doing this? Because I’ve been ruminating on small packages of words that convey a lot with a little. In a word, I’m thinking about FLASH. Also known as sudden, micro, mini, prose poem and hybrid, flash pieces are writing of up to about 1500 words. We might think of them as works that make their own small screens and then fill them. My first book, (made), is a concatenated collection of such writing. Bhanu Kapil called it a “magical dictionary….It’s not trajectory. It’s not narrative. It’s vibration.” (Thanks, Bhanu!)

In these shorter works, the words do extra work. They do vibrate together. And so we must pay extra attention to how they are fitting together. And yet, we can also shoot out of the cannon without worrying we will fall to the ground before hitting our target because we do not have to go as far as we do in the short story or essay or novella or, god forbid, the book. So much possibility in brevity! Which isn’t to say that we need to think of truncating our expression; hardly. We can think of it as an explosion onto the page.

That’s one way, anyway. I also adore flash that sneaks up on me. Or quietly and kaleidoscopically turns around its subject creating prisms on the walls in the room in which I’m reading. There are so many modes for making in this form. I’m back to working on a few of them of late as helpmates to the multimedia novel I’ve been writing for a handful of years now. They serve to give me a sense of completion while I spend the majority of my days with the sense of leaving everything unfinished each time I shut down my computer.

And so I decided to share my process. To that end, I’ve created a Flash Writing workshop for Writing Workshops Dallas. Come write with me! You can respond in fiction or CNF (creative non-fiction). It’s online so you can join in from anywhere. We will read, write, critique, and discuss these gems and also cover avenues for publishing. A one-on-one consultation with me on your work is included.

All the details are here at Writing Workshops Dallas.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I’ve heard it said that white is a color. Meaning, we need to rethink the fact that if race is not named in a story, it’s assumed the writer and the characters are white. But if the character is a person of color, then that color is named, right? Why not name whiteness so that it, too, can be examined rather than operate as the water we swim in?

I am white, and in my latest book-length work I have called that out. I am attempting to write what whiteness is for me, among many other things. It’s tricky because it also means that I might be centering the white experience. In fact, I am. Well, my white experience. Also, my female experience. Also a writer’s. A Leftie. An Emma Goldman fanatic. A pb&j eater. Bleeding heart animal lover. Joke teller. Raconteur! Okay, you get the picture (or a picture, anyway).

Is this a brave act, confronting race as a white person? I don’t know. But I want to pivot here to an amazing interview with Tiphanie Yanique by Namrata Poddar at Kweli Journal that digs into race and its role in storytelling, also among other things.

“The first thing I tell my students is that they must write bravely. That means writing towards the things that most make you uncomfortable—and part of why that is brave is mostly because it’s not easy.  Brave writing means failing a lot of the time—even when writing well, there will be failures in the work.”

Are you willing to fail? Are you willing to take on that which makes you uncomfortable? Either way, please do read the full interview. It is rich with insight and will urge you toward writing what you’re afraid of.

As I write this, the snow is bombing the East Coast where I live. My cat is curled up in my lap, positioned in the beneficent path of the space heater at my feet. Slate coated juncos, black capped chickadees, yellow bellied woodpeckers, mourning doves, and (of course) gray and red squirrels are swarming the seed in the feeder – in this bluster! The wind is whipping the snow as if it was snapping bed linens outside my window. It’s extreme out there, folks.

Fortunately, I have lots to read. I’m loaded up with books by Italo Calvino, Rivka Galchen, Emma Goldman, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, while eagerly awaiting Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters to come in. I just came across her earlier this week and can’t believe I didn’t know of her sooner. Actually, scratch that. It is not surprising that as an African American woman she’d been slighted by many a syllabus. Herenow, I assign you this story. Then snatch up every last thing she’s written, and we’ll compare notes. (I’m not  kidding – let me know what you think.)

Also keeping me warm are client manuscripts. This winter, I’ve been working with short story writers, sketch comedians, poets, novelists, and a doctor working on a nonfiction book that promises to explode the way we think about a major component of healthcare. I love how helping other writers to make their work better also helps me to do the good work on my own.

Speaking of which, I’m excited to tell you that I just found out Junot Diaz took ten years to write The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I’m clocking in at roughly four at this point, so I’m in pretty good stead. Not four continuous years, mind you (I took a year off to fight a casino), but no kidding the seed of the project first came in 2012. It has transformed so remarkably with each round of revision that I have made peace, for the most part, with the time it is taking to bring this book to fruition.

Off to make a fire!

 

 

It literally is. Burning. And here I type these words that are not water on the woods. Are not a hose. Etc. and onward. So why write? I spend a handful of paragraphs on that at Grub Street’s blog in advance of the Writing About Politics workshop I’m leading there  Sat, Nov 4 in Boston. Read. Sign-up. Tell friends. Write. You heard me.

In honor of #WITmonth, here’s a list of a few interviews and reviews I’ve done that feature women writers whose work has been translated into English. The campaign was founded by Meytal Radzinski in 2014 to deal with the dearth of women writers in translation. You can read more about it and the events it’s spawned here. There are great resources there, books recommended, and good links.

Meanwhile, have a look at three authors I’ve had words with and about. I adore their books, so please buy them! Read them attentively. Then tell friends.

In no particular order:

*”In an age of what some have called High Interiority in literature a la Knausgaard, Ferrante, and the oodles of revelatory memoirs flooding the market, Helle Helle’s intimate novel This Should Be Written in the Present Tense shouldn’t seem out of place….Instead, it turns out we’re in for something quite different.” So begins my review of the Danish author’s first novel to be translated into English for Electric Literature. In my interview of her for Bookslut, she shares great bits about her writing process. “A novel can’t be thought into existence, it has to be written. The hands are always wiser than the head.”

*Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin‘s debut novel Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and has received a ton of rightly deserved attention. I interviewed her for Full Stop where we spoke about the novel living inside the reader, politics, and her thoughts on translation. “[I]t is curious how translation methods can change from one country to another. Germans, for example, they are so analytic, so exhaustive. I met three times for at least two hours with my translator for the last book.”

*Lastly, I reviewed Belgian author Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s 1937 novella La Femme de Gilles for 3:AM Magazine. This was reissued by Melville House as part of their Never Sink series, and in the review I consider, among other things, why now for this particular work. “[W]hy, we might ask, is this book receiving attention now? Is Bourdouxhe’s tale important to recover because this is a woman writing about a woman? Does it not complicate the female experience to have women represented variously?”

For more, many more, recommendations of who to read and what else is going on this month, also check out Susan Bernofsky’s excellent site Translationista.

 

Well, writing. More accurately, revising, but that includes writing. And also fishing, in a way, though gardening analogies have always come more readily to me for the creative process. Perhaps that’s because I put my hands in dirt waaaaay more than I ever drop bait in water.

However I envision it, next week I’m Kingston bound for a few days with the manuscript. I’m printing that baby out, getting the three hole punch for ring binding, and bringing a pen to take notes on actual pages. I’ll be doing this at the Kingston Writers Studio Retreat, a new venture by writers Sari Botton and Jen Doll. There will be time to write, hike, talk shop, read from our writing, and listen to a talk on Mercury, the planet, not the element. Astrology rather than astronomy, but I’m down for that.

There’s to be a public performance on Saturday, July 15 at 6 PM. There’s a FB event, but here are some details. Come if you’re in the area!

Writers Reading: Summer Camp
Hosted by Kingston Writers’ Studio
Saturday, July 15 at 6 PM – 8 PM

Keegan Ales
20 Saint James St, Kingston, New York 12401